AMD has announced an official price cut for the Radeon R9 280, pulling it down from $279 to $249.

In case you missed it earlier, the AMD Radeon R9 280 was announced back in March and it is pretty much a rebrand of the Radeon HD 7950. It is based on AMD's 28nm Tahiti GPU, packs 1792 Stream Processors, 112 TMUs and 32 ROPs, 3GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 384-bit memory interface and works at 827MHz base GPU and 933MHz GPU Boost clocks while memory is set at 5000MHz, at least when it comes to those that follow AMD's reference design.

While it officially launched with a $279 price tag, AMD has now dropped it by $30, putting it smack in the middle between the R9 280X, priced at US $299 and the R9 270X, priced at US $199. This price also puts the R9 280 in direct competition with Nvidia's GTX 760 graphics card, which also sells for $249.

Newegg.com has launched a deal on select AMD Radeon HD 7000 series graphics card that allow you to save up to US $90 confirming the recent price drop that we have seen all across Europe.

The deal puts the Powercolor PCS+ AX7950 HD 7950 down to US $179.99 after US $30 rebate and with free shipping as well as MSI Radeon HD 7950 that can be bought for as low US $179.99 after $25 rebate. The cheapest HD 7970 graphics card comes from Sapphire and can be had for as low as US $279.99 after a US $20 rebate and with free shipping, while XFX has the cheapest HD 7970 GHz Edition for as low as US $319.99 after a US $30 rebate.

Retailers/e-tailers wants to clear the stock of AMD's Tahiti based HD 7970 and HD 7950 graphics cards as we will soon see some new versions based on the same chips, as well as some all-new graphics cards based on hot Volcanic Islands GPU.

Not everyone can afford the latest GPU, and even a lot of people who can simply don’t want to. Of course, each new generation brings plenty of new features and improvements to the table, but the price tag is often the most compelling argument.

Hawaii is set to be announced tonight, although we will probably have to wait a few weeks for retail availability. Between now and mid- to late-October many vendors, disties and retailers will try to get rid of excess Tahiti stock and we’re already seeing some movement in Europe, a bit less in the US, so we’ll focus on Europe.

For example, the MSI HD 7950 Boost Twin Frozr III can be ordered for €199 in a couple of German shops. That is down from €250 roughly a month ago.

As for the HD 7970, there are a few interesting deals. The Asus HD 7970 DirectCU II Top now goes for €249, down from €349 a month ago. The HD 7970 cards from PowerColor and MSI are available for €249 as of yesterday. In case that’s not good enough, the HD 7970 GHz Edition clocked at 1050MHz is also seeing substantial cuts. The Asus ROG Matrix Platinum is widely available for €299 and less. It cost €399 a week ago. The non platinum version is even cheaper.

In any case, these are some very tempting cuts, but bear in mind that Hawaii has yet to launch and the best deals are yet to come. Until we know a bit more about Hawaii pricing, we can’t exactly recommend a venerable Tahiti card, but bargain hunters should definitely take them into consideration.

In case you’re interested, check your nearest price search engine. However, we should probably give AIBs and channel players a couple of more weeks to adjust the prices ahead of launch, as they could come up with even better deals.

Seen and detailed at Cebit 2013 earlier this month, Sapphire has now officially launched its new HD 7950 Mac Edition graphics card designed to be used with Mac Pro desktop systems.

The new Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition, based on AMD's GCN architecture, will bring a new level of graphics perfomance improvement to Mac Pro users in a wide range of applications including gaming, audio or video editing and content creation. According to Sapphire, the HD 7950 Mac Edition will bring over 200 percent improvement in games, up to 30 percent in general benchmarks and up to 300 percent in graphics intensive benchmarks when compared to the Nvidia 8800GT which is commonly used in Mac Pro systems.

Although there are no precise details regarding the clocks, Sapphire noted that the card comes with 3GB of GDDR5 memory and delivers up to 2.87 TFLOPS of single precision compute power as well as hardware support for Open GL 4.2, Open CL 1.2 and AMD HD3D tech and APP acceleration. It also comes with all advanced post-processing and scaling operations, courtesy of AMD GCN architecture, including de-blocking de-noising, automatic de-interlacing, Mosquito noise reduction and edge enhancement as well as advanced image quality enhancement technology, such as adaptive anti-aliasing and 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering.

It features two mini DisplayPort outputs with a maximum reoslution of 3840x2160 per display under Mac OSX as well as a Dual-link DVI port with HDCP (2560x1600) and 3GHz HDMI 1.4a port (3840x2160 maximum resolution). As noted by Sapphire, the new HD 7950 Mac Edition works on all Apple Mac Pro models from 2010 with an available PCI-Express x16 slot and needs two 6-pin PCI-Express power coonectors that are supplied with the card.

For those PC users that simply like the look of the new HD 7590 Mac Edition, Sapphire decided to include a dual BIOS switch that switches between non-UEFI MAC OS X/Windows BIOS and UEFI hybrid BIOS for Windows.

Unfortunately, Sapphire did not shere any details regarding the price or the availability date.

According to a rumor over at HT4U.net, AMD is apparently working on yet another Tahiti GPU, the Tahiti-LE.

The new GPU could help AMD fill a hole between the HD 7950 and HD 7870, thus putting much more pressure on Nvidia's GTX 660 Ti graphics card. According to the post over at HT4U.net, AMD apparently is looking to place the new GPU in the HD 7800 series rather than the HD 7900 series which is already crowded with five models.

Although there are still no precise details regarding the new GPU, AMD has enough room cut the Tahiti GPU down, most probably down to 1535 stream processors and even play with the memory interface. The new SKU, based on the Tahiti-LE GPU will most likely be ready by the Christmas shopping season.

Certified Windows 8 drivers are already available for graphics cards from both sides, AMD and Nvidia. We decided to use the latest beta drivers that, although currently lacking certificates, promise better performance. We used dual GPU graphics cards because they put greater demands on the driver.

Dual GPU HD 7990 ended up significantly slower in some tests in Windows 8 than in 7, so we checked the results with a single GPU HD 7950 as well. Note however that AMD has not yet certified any drivers for its dual GPU HD 7990, because the card hasn’t been officially introduced yet. Power Color is the first AMD partner that went for the HD 7990 and dubbed it Devil 13, showing just what two Tahiti GPUs are capable of. We’ve heard of few other partners that introduced the card, but apparently it is a Power Color card under another name.

If you’re planning on strapping your rig with an HD 7990, you should know it has certain issues on PCI-E 3.0 slots with some motherboards. This can be fixed with a BIOS update (if such is available for your motherboard). We used the HD 7990 card with EVGA’s X79 FTW motherboard, but not before we disabled GEN 3 support in the motherboard BIOS.

We had no visible microstuttering etc. while gaming. The HD 7990 wouldn’t run Crysis 2 in CrossFire under Win 7. There is an application profile that’s supposed to fix this, but when we got down to it, we already exceeded the number of allowed installations for the game. EA support is currently offline (as well as previous two days) so we cannot investigate the matter at this time. We tried our luck with EA’s German support team, but we gave up after half an hour of waiting on hold. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time we’ve called tech support over authentication and we really feel for gamers or users who have to go through this.

As you can see from the results below, gaming results in Win 7 and Win 8 are pretty much the same.

Gaming under Win 7 or Win 8 largely depends on graphics drivers, so Nvidia and AMD made sure to provide quality drivers for Windows 8. In general, gaming with Win 8 isn’t much different, although we’re sure many will stick to the lucky 7.

Sapphire has followed up AMD with its new Radeon HD 7950 BIOS and launched a new Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Boost Vapor-X OC graphics card.

Sapphire even tweaked the specifications a bit leaving the base GPU clock at 850MHz but pushing the Boost clock up from AMD's 925MHz to 950MHz. It also comes with 3GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5GHz and paired up with a 384-bit memory interface.

As a part of Sapphire's Vapor-X lineup, the card uses a Sapphire Vapor-X cooler with larger vapor-chamber plate paired up with a large heatsink and a pair of 90mm fans. The PCB also got a slight tweak so you are looking at a graphics card that needs two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors due to its beefier VRM.

The new Sapphire HD 7950 Boost Vapor-X OC graphics card is expected to hit retail/e-tail with a US $350 price tag.

After the recent price cut back in July, that included a good US $50 price cut for HD 7970, HD 7950 and HD 7870 graphics cards, AMD has apparently decided to cut some of these prices even further taking the HD 7950 3GB graphics card down to US $320, or just in line with Nvidia's recently release GTX 660 Ti graphics card.

AMD has already dropped the HD 7970 from US $479 to US $429, HD 7950 from US $399 to US $349 and the HD 7870 down from US $349 to US $299. The new price cut skips the HD 7970 graphics card but includes the HD 7950, HD 7870 as well as the 1 and 2GB versions of the HD 7850.

The most important is probably the price cut for the 3GB HD 7950 which battles it out with Nvidia's recently released GTX 660 Ti. The HD 7950 3GB is, according to the report, will receive a US $30 price cut placing it at US $320. The HD 7870 2GB graphics card got another US $50 price cut pushing it down to US $250 which probably makes it one of the most interesting mid-range graphics cards on the market.

AMD also decided to drop price on 1 and 2GB version of the HD 7850 graphics card taking them down by US $40 to US $190 and US $210, respectively.

The competition is always good and for now, AMD has definitely rolled the ball to Nvidia's court.

Powercolor has launched its newest Radeon HD 7950 graphics card simply dubbed Powercolor HD 7950 Boost State Edition. The new HD 7950 features a new BIOS that should give HD 7950 enough of an edge to counter the launch of Nvidia GTX 660 Ti graphics card.

Although it was expected that new BIOS will simply show up on any new HD 7950 graphics cards it appears that some partners would rather launch a totally new graphics card. In case you missed it, the new BIOS brings the GPU clock up to 850MHz while memory ended up reference 1250MHz.

The new BIOS update also brings AMD's Powertune with Boost taking the GPU up to 925MHz when possible. AMD already promised that the additional "boost" will not affect the actual price but that we will have to wait until these cards actually show up in retail/e-tail.

Unfortunately, Powercolor did not announce the precise price or the actual availability date.